Can a driven physical system undergoing dissipative adaptation implement an artificial-life computational operation?
This would provide a further step in the connections between the information-processing underlying self-replication and the dissipation of energy inherent to metabolism [1]}, [2]}, [3]}, ultimately helping us to imitate the transition from inanimate to living matter [4]}, [5]} in diverse physical systems.
More broadly, searching for a lifelike self-organized computation could also contribute to the recently proposed goal of `thermodynamic computing' [6]}.
